Chapter 4 — Falling Gently
“Rewind time… and interfere with the girl’s suicide.”
When that ridiculous idea first crossed my mind, I never truly intended to save her.
Simply stopping a suicide wouldn’t create a happy ending. It would only be like continuing a game after a game over—returning straight back to the stage called bullying. From the perspective of a girl who chose suicide just to quit that terrible game, my interference would probably be nothing more than an unwanted favor.
And besides, it was doubtful that bullying was the only reason behind her suicide.
Maybe she had always struggled with socializing.
Maybe she had a complex about her appearance.
Those things could have contributed directly to her decision as well.
If, like me, she chose suicide simply because she didn’t want to be hurt anymore, then stopping her might only make her suffer even more.
Still, I couldn’t just forget about it.
The biggest reason was that I had overheard the conversation of those four people. In my mind, the image of the girl who died had firmly taken root as “a pitiful girl who killed herself because of bullying.”
I knew it was just my own assumption.
But doing nothing felt the same as turning a blind eye to bullying.
It left a bitter aftertaste.
It filled me with guilt.
I was certain that I would remember it again and again until the day I died.
And I absolutely didn’t want to spend the remaining two years of my life being haunted by that guilt.
In other words—
My reason for interfering with her suicide was simply to create an excuse.
If I did nothing, I would definitely regret it.
So I decided I would stop her once.
Ideally, she would abandon suicide after that.
But even if she tried again, then I could cleanly give up and say, “It can’t be helped.”
As long as I could tell myself “I did everything I could,” that would be enough.
Whether she lived or died mattered less than whether I would be free from guilt.
This wasn’t for her sake.
It was for mine.
So the correct expression wasn’t “stop her suicide.”
It was “interfere with it.”
After turning time back twenty-four hours, I immediately headed to the bridge.
It was just past three in the afternoon—before the snow had started falling.
As I ran, I prayed that the girl hadn’t jumped yet.
The next time I could rewind time would be thirty-six hours later. If she had already jumped by then, there would be nothing I could do.
The cold air stabbed into my skin. My ears hurt so badly it felt like they might tear off, but I kept running.
When the bridge finally came into view, the first thing I checked was the small island in the middle of the river. But there were rocks blocking the view, and I couldn’t see clearly from a distance.
My eyesight wasn’t great either, so I had no choice but to look down from the bridge.
Relying on my memory from before I rewound time, I moved to the spot directly above where she had jumped.
I was out of breath.
My vision swayed.
My legs trembled.
I gripped the freezing railing with both hands and forced my breathing to steady.
Praying that the girl wasn’t lying below…
I looked down at the island.
For a moment, I imagined her body lying there, covered in blood.
But there was nothing.
Only scattered rocks.
Relief washed over me, and the strength drained from my body. I collapsed to the ground, leaning against the railing.
“What am I getting so worked up about…?”
I muttered while looking up at the clear blue sky.
If she had already died, I would have accepted it. I had only come here to create an excuse for myself. That alone should have been enough.
After resting for a while, I sat there watching the river and waited for the girl to appear.
Leaning against the railing, I fiddled with my phone while waiting, but the cold soon became unbearable. I put the phone away and shoved my hands into my pockets.
The Ouroboros Silver Watch in my right pocket was so cold it felt like ice.
By the time it passed five o’clock, no people or cars had crossed the bridge.
Snow began to fall softly.
The sky darkened with evening, and the orange glow of the streetlights illuminated the bridge.
I only realized I had forgotten my umbrella once the snow started falling, but since it was light snowfall, it wasn’t a big problem.
As I blew warm breath into my hands, I saw someone walking toward the bridge.
Squinting, I tried to make out who it was.
A girl.
She looked about the height of a middle school student.
I became convinced she was the girl who had committed suicide.
She wasn’t holding an umbrella either, and even in the darkness I could see her face—
But the moment I saw it, my certainty shattered.
She was an incredibly beautiful girl.
Long black hair.
Pale skin that contrasted sharply with it.
A slender figure, and perfectly arranged features.
There was a faint air of fragility around her, but it only enhanced her beauty rather than detract from it.
“There’s no way a girl like that would commit suicide.”
Watching her walk through the falling snow toward the bridge, that was the thought that crossed my mind.
I had assumed that someone who committed suicide would look like me—someone whose negativity showed on their face.
Someone with a gloomy expression.
Someone with visible insecurities.
Someone whose pain you could tell just by looking at them.
The girl walked past me slightly, stopped, and quietly looked out over the scenery for a while.
Then she turned around and walked back the way she came.
After that, a few other people passed by.
But no one who seemed like the girl who had committed suicide appeared.
By the time it was past eight, the snowfall had grown heavier.
I was reaching the limit of what I could endure in the cold.
A thought crossed my mind.
I might freeze to death before she even shows up.
That wouldn’t even be funny.
Then suddenly, a question occurred to me.
Was the girl really going to come at all?
Looking down, it was pitch black and impossible to see anything. Finding a body down there would be close to a miracle.
For someone to jump, be discovered, and be reported on the news by eleven o’clock…
It seemed unlikely.
Then a thought struck me.
What if the future had changed?
Just like how the lottery numbers had changed, it wouldn’t be strange if the future changed as well.
That guess turned out to be correct.
When I finally gave up and went home, the news was different from before I rewound time.
The weather forecast began without any report of a suicide.
The future had clearly changed.
I didn’t know the reason, but the girl who had died never came to the bridge.
That was the conclusion I reached that day.
All the while believing that the girl I saw on the bridge had been the same girl who committed suicide.
The next day, I checked to see whether the girl had truly survived.
Just because she didn’t jump from that bridge didn’t mean she hadn’t killed herself somewhere else.
I spent hours carefully searching through the news and the internet.
But I found nothing related to her.
It seemed she hadn’t committed suicide.
Even so, I kept checking every day afterward.
The girl who had died was just an ordinary middle school student.
Unlike celebrities, suicides of ordinary people were rarely reported.
The only reason the bridge incident had been reported before was probably because a fall from a bridge could have been an accident or a crime.
There were privacy concerns as well.
With over twenty thousand suicides every year in Japan, it would be impossible to report them all.
Sometimes news reports appear later saying “A middle school student was found to have committed suicide due to bullying,” but even those cases are only a tiny fraction.
Maybe that girl had already killed herself somewhere else and it just hadn’t been reported yet.
I kept thinking that eventually the news would mention it.
But there was another reason I kept searching.
I believed—
She would attempt suicide again.
If someone had strong determination, the future wouldn’t change.
For example, I didn’t care about clothes. Whenever I went out, I simply wore the first thing that caught my eye.
There was no intention like “I will wear this today.”
The choice was random.
So even after rewinding time, I might choose something different.
That was similar to how lottery numbers changed—like drawing them again.
But if I were someone who cared about clothes and had already decided what to wear the day before, then I would most likely wear the same thing again after rewinding time.
It was obvious.
Unless something changed because of the time reversal, office workers would still go to work and students would still go to school.
Only things influenced by coincidence would change.
If that was the case, then maybe the girl not committing suicide that day was just coincidence.
Let’s assume she had been struggling with the decision for a long time.
Just like how I couldn’t bring myself to commit suicide for years, maybe she had been living in a state where she could have done it anytime.
On Christmas, she might have coincidentally chosen to do it.
After time was rewound, she might have coincidentally chosen not to.
That was entirely possible.
But if that were true, then unless the underlying problem was solved, the day would eventually come when she would coincidentally choose suicide again.
And besides—
It couldn’t end like this.
If I had met her, I had planned to talk to her.
Not just offer comforting words, but also give her a solution to the bullying.
Since I was doing this to create an excuse for myself, I had at least planned to offer minimal support.
But I never met her.
The result this time was simply that she got lucky and didn’t die.
The bullying hadn’t been resolved.
She hadn’t been saved.
And it wasn’t an ending where I could say “I did everything I could.”
For both me and the girl who died, it was the worst possible outcome.
If this was how it would end, it would have been better not to rewind time at all.
It wasn’t enough to stop her suicide.
I had to interfere with it.
Driven by stubbornness, I kept searching through news reports.
And then—
One week later.
My prediction came true.
Another suicide report appeared.
“A middle school girl.”
“Fell from a bridge.”
“Died from the fall.”
It was the same kind of generic report, but it was clearly the same person.
This time, I gathered information before rewinding time.
I went to a nearby police box and pretended to be an informant.
“I think I saw a middle school girl near the bridge yesterday. I don’t remember the exact time, but if I knew what she was wearing, I might remember something.”
With that excuse, I managed to learn the time the body was discovered and what she had been wearing.
Then I rewound time again.
From early afternoon, I waited on the bridge.
The first person to discover the body had called the police around six in the evening.
If the girl appeared before then, I would know the future hadn’t changed.
Thanks to the information I gathered, I felt more at ease this time.
A little after five.
As the surroundings began to darken—
A girl walked toward the bridge.
It was hard to see her face from far away, but her clothes matched the information exactly.
It was definitely the girl who had committed suicide.
But—
The one walking toward me was that same beautiful girl from before.
Just like last time, she stopped a short distance away and looked out at the scenery.
Maybe she hadn’t committed suicide before because I had been there.
Watching her profile as she gazed at the scenery, I wondered:
Why would a girl like her commit suicide?
Perfect features.
Long silky black hair.
Pale skin.
A slender body.
There wasn’t a single negative element about her appearance.
So maybe it was her personality?
But her calm and mature atmosphere made that hard to imagine.
Which meant—
The only explanation I could think of was jealousy.
A girl like her would stand out in any class.
She would probably be popular with boys too.
It wouldn’t be strange at all if she became the target of other girls’ jealousy.
So I assumed that she had done nothing wrong—she was simply being bullied.
If that guess was correct, it worked in my favor.
If the problem had been something like deep insecurities or difficulty with relationships, I would have had no solution.
But if the problem was bullying, then there was still hope.
Telling myself that I could handle this, I approached her.
“Did something bad happen? You look troubled.”
When I spoke, the girl looked around before pointing at herself.
“There’s no one else here,” I said with a smile.
“…I’m fine,” she replied in a small voice.
“Honestly, when someone says they’re ‘fine,’ that usually means they’re not fine at all.”
“……”
The girl fell silent.
She seemed wary of me.
“Coming here on such a cold day… do you like this bridge?”
“……”
She only nodded silently.
This wasn’t going anywhere.
So I decided to cut straight to the point.
“I’ll guess what’s bothering you.”
The girl kept looking at the distant scenery, but I thought I saw her body twitch slightly.
She was probably startled but trying to act calm.
“You’re wondering whether or not to jump from here, aren’t you?”
At that moment, she finally turned toward me.
The calm expression she had been wearing vanished completely.
Shock.
Confusion.
Doubt.
Hesitation.
All of those emotions swirled across her face.
“Am I wrong?” I asked.
She shook her head slightly.
“The reason you want to kill yourself… it’s because of bullying. Am I right about that too?”
Even though she looked confused, she opened her mouth.
“…How do you know?”
“I can’t tell you that,” I replied vaguely.
Instead, I asked her,
“Didn’t you have anyone you could talk to? Your parents, or a teacher?”
She silently shook her head.
“I see… So you’ve been alone all this time…”
